rift

CEFRC2

/ɹɪft/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
noun
A serious disagreement or division between people or groups.
02
noun
Extra detail
A break in the clouds, fog, mist etc., which allows light through.

Examples

At a glance

Sits at C2 on the CEFR scale

Deep Dive

Extra meanings

A lack of cohesion; a state of conflict, incompatibility, or emotional distance.
A chasm or fissure.
A shallow place in a stream; a ford.

In context

My marriage is in trouble: the fight created a rift between us and we can't reconnect.
The Grand Canyon is a rift in the Earth's surface, but is smaller than some of the undersea ones.
to rift an oak

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The word in print, with each source given in full.

Where ashes are heaped in drifts / Over vineyard and field and town, / Whenever he starts and lifts / His head through the blackened rifts / Of the crags that keep him down
1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Enceladus”, in Birds of Passage
As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests.
1897, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Westminster [London]: Archibald Constable and Company, […], →OCLC
Far back in the dim geologic ages, when the sediments of the old seas were being gathered and outspread in smooth sheets like leaves of a book, and when these sediments became dry land, and were baked and crumbled into the sky as mountain ranges; when the lava-floods of the Fire Period were being lavishly poured forth from innumerable rifts and craters;[…].
1918, John Muir, Steep Trails
I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.
1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Vintage, published 1993, page 130
Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has opened a new rift with Donald Trump by denouncing the US president’s tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.
2025 June 3, David Smith, “Elon Musk calls Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax bill a ‘disgusting abomination’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

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From Middle English rift, of North Germanic origin; akin to Danish rift, Norwegian Bokmål rift (“breach”), Old Norse rífa (“to tear”). More at rive.